Genre: TV Pilot – Medical Drama
Premise: A brand new young crop of doctors begin their career at a cash-strapped county hospital.
About: Jason Katims is best known for producing the beloved TV show, Friday Night Lights. He also updated the old Ron Howard film, Parenthood, turning it into a TV show, which I’ve heard makes everybody who watches it cry. County was a show he was putting together for NBC with Jason Ritter to star last year. A pilot was shot, but it never aired. Let’s figure out why.
Writer: Jason Katims
Details: 71 pages – Network Draft 1/5/12
What in the world is going on?
Why am I reviewing a TV pilot??
I’ll tell you why. Because Pilot Week is coming up at the end of the month and I gotta get in some TV reviewing practice! I don’t know jack shit about these TV scripts, or telescripts or teletubbies or whatever the hell they’re called. When I wanna watch TV, I pal up with Johnny Depp and watch myself some scratch n sniff Honey Boo Boo!
Okay okay. I do watch SOME scripted TV. I almost watched every season of Breaking Bad (the 4th season was starting to get repetitive so I haven’t returned in awhile). But ever since Lost went bye-bye, I’ve been desperately searching for something to drool over. I actually have one (and only one) idea for a TV show (it’s an hour-long sci-fi drama, of course), but since I’m so unfamiliar with all these strange TV terms (cold open???), I need me some study time before I can even begin to write anything related to TV.
Which brings us to today. Jason Katims is a big deal in the TV world. He wrote this show called Friday Night Lights, which pretty much every single girl I’ve ever run into is in love with. So I figure it must be good. And with medical dramas being the bread and butter of the TV business, who better to give it a shot than the guy writing about football in Texas, right?
29 year old Jack Malloy is on his first day of work as an intern at County Hospital. Jack is a good guy, the kind of guy who wants to make a difference. Given the opportunity to help someone but lose his job or not help someone and keep his job, it’s pretty clear what Jack’s going to do. This man’s a helper!
Joining Jack is Erica (“too pretty for this place”). She’s a little fragile. A little afraid to speak her mind. But she’s freaking adorable. Which is why Jack falls for her immediately. Uh-oh. Too bad, Jack. Erica’s got a fiancé who lives out of town!
Next we have Talaikha (95 pounds and maddeningly unemotional). Why do I feel like I’ve seen this character before? Travis – African American who worked his way up from nothing (not that he’d ever tell you that). Billy is the oldest intern of the bunch at 40, but he’s plump and ready to share a joke no matter how inappropriate the situation. And finally, Rosa, a Hispanic “ball of fire” (what else!).
Each character experiences their own shocking first day, with some having a tougher time than others. The most interesting storyline, of course, is Jack’s. He’s got a dying Vietnamese mother who’s a Jehova’s Witness and therefore refuses to accept a blood transfusion (she only accepts the blood of Jesus Christ and they’ve run out of that at the moment). Making matters worse is that the mother has a teenage daughter without a father. In other words, this is the only person she has in the world. Therefore, Jack must come up with a solution to save a woman who refuses to be saved.
Across the hallways, Rosa must tell someone her age that she has inoperable cancer. Erica gets beat up by a family for possibly swaying a patient to sign a “do not interrupt” dying request. Travis spots his sister in the E.R. after, once again, O.D.’ing, an issue exacerbated by the fact that she’s got a daughter. Oh, and of course that goofy Billy’s stuck with a leg amputation patient who insists on keeping his leg!
The pilot mainly focuses on the unique problems a typical doctor goes through working at a county hospital. For example, when a patient is having major headaches, an intern suggests an MRI. They’re promptly told that they might as well be ordering brain surgery. When people get sick here, the stuff you learned at medical school is useless. This is the real world where neither the patients nor the hospital have any money. This forces doctors like Jack to make awful choices, like sending deathly sick homeless patients back out on the street in order to clear up rooms for all the new bodies arriving. Don’t agree with it? Sorry, that’s County.
But don’t you think that’s going to get Jack down. After abandoning all his other patients and even jetting across town to another hospital to see if they can perform a rare bloodless transfer procedure on his Jehova’s Witness, he finally finds a solution to the problem and saves her life. Looks like that daughter is going to have a mother after all.
Okay, really though? The sassy spitfire Latina doctor? The pudgy funny doctor? The white lead who’s constantly trying to do the right thing, rules be damned? Isn’t this like every other one of these shows ever created?
Here’s the thing, though. Whenever these shows show up (like Gray’s Anatomy), aren’t they ALL just like every other medical drama ever created? What’s different about them? To me, not much, and yet Gray’s Anatomy became this big hit. So on the one hand I’m saying, “I’ve seen this before,” but on the other I’m saying, “As did I with other medical dramas that became hits.”
But to me, the stereotypes were just too big here. I mean come on. The 95 pound Indian girl with zero emotion, who tells her patients they’re going to die without a hint of compassion. Isn’t that THE EXACT SAME CHARACTER as the Korean doctor on Gray’s Anatomy!?? What’s scary is that I know that and I don’t even watch that show! People who love these shows, I’m guessing, would find this even more cliché.
Then again, maybe this is something I don’t understand about television. Maybe television writers consider these characters “archetypes” and you start a pilot with them because their issues are easy to identify with and latch on to. Then, because you have a hundred hours to play with via all those episodes, that’s where you get into the depth, into the origins, into the meat of who these people really are. I ask you, TV writers, is that the case? Because I know in the feature world, I would call these blatant stereotypes and would tell you to avoid them like the plague. Why not make the fat guy the one with no emotions? Why does fat always have to equal “the funny guy?”
Despite HUGE problems with the endless character clichés, I have to give it to Katims. He almost made me tear up a couple of times. A favorite plotline of mine was the Rosa “delivering cancer news” stuff. It’s been done before, but Katims did a good job giving us some backstory on the girl (her boyfriend stuck with her through the first cancer treatments, but he’s pulling away at the thought of a second round) and created this great bond between the girls as they decided to stick it to this asshole when the negative tests came back. But instead they come back positive. And they’re REALLY BAD. As in she’ll die soon. And all of a sudden, Rosa realizes that these two won’t be friends, that there’s nothing she can do for this girl, and that she’s basically leaving too, just like the boyfriend. I silently cursed myself for falling for this but darnit if it didn’t work.
And Katims seems to have a talent for that. You can’t help but eventually hop onto the idealistic Jack’s back and believe in his quest to save every damn person in this hospital. And I loved how he did that with very little dialogue. Jack is almost all action, and yet you feel closer to him than anyone else. To that end, Katims did a really good job. I cared about enough of these people in the end to want to know more about them. But County never quite overcomes the obnoxious feeling of familiarity behind it. Placing things at a cash-strapped hospital made for some fresh challenges, but that doesn’t mean you can just transplant the character sheet over from another show. And for that reason, there’s no way I can give County a clean bill of health.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Ultimately, TV is about the characters, not the idea. It’s your characters who are going to take you through 100 episodes, so they have to be fascinating. In my opinion, that’s harder to do if they’re stereotypical. Give us people we’ve never seen before – especially if it’s a familiar setting like a hosptial – and you’ll rope us in immediately. There wasn’t a single character in County that I haven’t seen in a medical show before, and I believe that was its downfall.
